Mobile, Social & Culturally Oriented Learning

Theme

There are two simultaneous transformative changes occuring in Education: the use of mobile and tablet devices for accessing educational content, and the rise of the MOOCs. Happening independently and in parallel are significant advances in interaction technologies through smartphones and tablets, and the rise in the use of social-media and social-network analytics in several domains.

The goal of mobiscool is twofold: (a) To understand the usage, and student behaviour in this new environment (MOOCS and mobile devices) and (b) To design experiments and implement them to make these new tools more effective by tailoring them to the individual student’s personal, social and cultural settings and preferences.

Keynote Speaker: Justin Reich, HarvardX Research Fellow

Justin is the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, based in the Office of the President and Provost at Harvard University, where he explores the possibilities and limits of open online learning. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a visiting lecturer in MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education program. He is also the co-founder of EdTechTeacher, a professional learning consultancy devoted to helping teachers leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments.He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he led the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative to examine how social media are used in K-12 classrooms. His dissertation, The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools, drew upon a population of 180,000 education-related wikis as well as over 100 interviews and observations with wiki-using teachers to measure the degree to which wikis supported deeper learning in classrooms across the United States. More details here and here.